Gahist.live Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Gahist.live pop-up alerts can show up unexpectedly, covering the material of the site you visited or opening your web browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking the Gahist.live ad can result in the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the tutorial of Gahist.live popups clearing in various manners, as well as examining your PC for extra malware existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Gahist.live manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are Gahist.live pop-ups?

Gahist.live popups are a result of adware action. Adware is a kind of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which creates a substantial volume of revenue for adware suppliers. These advertisements may have explicit material, or have a web link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no reason to inspect the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is cash.

Gahist.live push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a very good, cheap and very productive marketing instrument¹. It permits the seller to attach the buyers’ attention to their website, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to buy. When the person will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to buy is provided at the online store he/she saw earlier with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this opportunity and buy it. Considering the extremely small cost for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing tool is a much-loved thing amidst the marketing teams of large online retailers.

Nonetheless, such a profitable plan could not be missed by virus developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup ads by force to the victims of malware attack is an excellent basis for malevolent adjustments with the popup promotions. And Gahist.live promotions is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short summary for the Gahist.live

How have I got the Gahist.live virus?

There are a lot of ways of getting infected by the adware that lead to the Gahist.live popups storm. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can additionally be downloaded from the main site, and the adware is presented as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of users often make use of the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various tools that are free, or even hacked programs. Every one of these types of applications are risky, since it is extremely easy to include a Gahist.live malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Gahist.live popup virus may also be concealed in the advertisement somewhere on the odd website. Such sites are usually filled with colorful and blinking advertisements, and their owners typically approve any type of promos to be placed on their page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad contractor realizes what will happen when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you can also receive something a lot more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious promotions.

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially undesirable applications, like Gahist.live pop-up virus can provoke a variety of troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-ups can present you the ads, where you are offered to download one more strange program, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually spread with the use of the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, can have spyware functionality. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related advertisements are also chosen as a spreading way by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these advertisements, they can be clicked by someone who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Gahist.live pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Gahist.live adware removal consists of 2 parts. Initially, we need to deal with the malware, and afterwards take care of the consequences of its action. The removal procedure is quite easy, since it can be done even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-malware tool that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, because of its significant resources consumption, as well as some bugs that may be crucial for some types of users, Defender is frequently disabled by the users, so its utilization is likely impossible. What’s more, different trojan viruses are able to disable the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven anti-malware device that will surely erase the malware from your computer and create an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s deal with Gahist.live adware initially.

Removing Gahist.live popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

• Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.

• Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Gahist.live malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

Manual method of browser reset

To reset Edge, do the following steps :

1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option :

2. After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original :

For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions :

1. Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information” :

2. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option :

After choosing this option, you will see the next message :

If you use Google Chrome

1. Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button :

2. In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults” :

3. Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default :

Opera can be reset in the next way

1. Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option :


2. After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown :

When the web browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your web browser will definitely be connected the right DNS while connecting to the site you want. Make a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following text³:

Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.

However, there is one problem that makes things much harder to fix, particularly without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware variants that are used to show you the Gahist.live pop-up ads are changing the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your system was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, but significant lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the normal, up until you attempt to open settings once more.

Reset your browser settings with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.

You can see the list of the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.

The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and also the reasons why I recommend it for malware elimination.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.